Submissions are solicited for the Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, an interdisciplinary conference that brings together researchers in all aspects of neural and statistical information processing and computation, and their applications. The conference is a highly selective, single track meeting that includes invited talks as well as oral and poster presentations of refereed papers. Submissions by authors who are new to NIPS are encouraged. The 2012 conference will be held on December 3-6 at Lake Tahoe, Nevada. One day of tutorials (December 3) will precede the main conference, and two days of workshops (December 7-8) will follow it at the same location.

Technical Areas: Papers are solicited in all areas of neural information processing and statistical learning, including, but not limited to:

Neuroscience: theoretical and experimental studies of processing and transmission of information in biological neurons and networks, including spike train generation, synaptic modulation, plasticity and adaptation.

Evaluation Criteria: Submissions will be refereed on the basis of technical quality, novelty, potential impact, and clarity.

Submission Instructions: All submissions will be made electronically, in PDF format. As in previous years, reviewing will be double-blind: the reviewers will not know the identities of the authors. Papers are limited to eight pages, including figures and tables, in the NIPS style. An additional ninth page containing only cited references is allowed. Complete submission and formatting instructions, including style files, are available from the NIPS website, http://nips.cc/.

Supplementary Material: Authors can submit up to 10 MB of material, containing proofs, audio, images, video, data or source code. Note that the reviewers and the program committee reserve the right to judge the paper solely on the basis of the 9 pages of the paper; looking at any extra material is up to the discretion of the reviewers and is not required.

Submission process: Electronic submissions will be accepted until Friday, June 1, 2012, 11 pm Universal Time (4 pm Pacific Daylight Time). As was the case last year, final papers will be due in advance of the conference.

Dual Submissions Policy: Submissions that are identical (or substantially similar) to versions that have been previously published, or accepted for publication, or during the NIPS review period are in submission to another peer-reviewed and published venue are not appropriate for NIPS, with three exceptions listed below. These exceptions, which have been approved by the NIPS Foundation board in the interests of speeding up scientific communication and improving the efficiency of peer review, are as follows:

Concurrent submission to other venues is acceptable provided that: (a) The concurrent submission or intention to submit to other venues is declared to all venues, (b) NIPS and the concurrent venues are given permission by the author(s) to coordinate reviewing, and (c) acceptance to one venue imposes withdrawal from all other venues with the exception stated in 2 below.
NIPS submissions that summarize a longer journal paper, whether published, accepted, or in submission, are acceptable if the authors inform NIPS and the journal and give them permission to coordinate reviewing.
It is acceptable to submit to NIPS 2012 work that has been made available as a technical report (or similar, e.g. in arXiv) as long as the conditions above are satisfied.

None of the above should be construed as overriding the requirements of other publishing venues. In addition, keep in mind that author anonymity to NIPS reviewers might be compromised for authors availing themselves of exceptions 2 and 3. Authors must declare submissions to other venues either through the CMT submission form, or via email to the program chairs at program-chairs@nips.cc.

Authors' Responsibilities: If there are papers that may appear to violate any of these conditions, it is the authors' responsibility to (1) cite these papers (preserving anonymity), (2) argue in the body of your paper why your NIPS paper is non-trivially different from these concurrent submissions, and (3) include anonymized versions of those papers in the supplemental material.

Demonstrations and Workshops: There is a separate Demonstration track at NIPS. Authors wishing to submit to the Demonstration track should consult the Call for Demonstrations. The workshops will be held at Lake Tahoe, Nevada, December 7-8. The upcoming call for workshop proposals will provide details.